The White Book

Do you want to go on? To push forward? Is it worth it?
There was a time when she had answered, trembling, no.
Now she walks, holding any answer in reserve. She leaves that semifrozen marsh, between dreariness and delicacy.

Learning to love life again is a long and complicated process.
Because at some point you will inevitably cast me aside.
When I am at my weakest, when I am most in need of help,
You will turn your back on me, cold and irrevocable.
And that is something perfectly clear to me.
And I cannot now return to the time before that knowledge.

Do I go down into that ocean floor, step by faltering step, or stand my ground here in this island of light?

If only you hadn’t stopped breathing. And had therefore been granted all this life in my stead, I who would then never have been born. If it had been granted to you to go firmly forward, with your own eyes and your own body, your back to that dark mirror.

If she believes that she has never been shattered, she can believe that she will be shattered no more.

Of course, her body had not yet died. Her spirit still had flesh to house it. Like the remaining section of a ruined brick wall, which the bombing had not managed to destroy completely, since moved and incorporated into another structure—from which the blood has been washed clean. Flesh that was now no longer young.

Were it not the case that life stretches out in a straight line, she might at some point become aware of having rounded a bend. Bringing, perhaps, the realization that nothing of that past could now be glimpsed were she to cast a quick glance over her shoulder.

there will be something she wants to say to the stillness, in the early hours of Sunday morning when the building’s other inhabitants have yet to stir.
Please, a little longer like this.
To give it time to wash me clean.

Looking at herself in the mirror, she never forgot that death was hovering behind that face. Faint yet tenacious, like black writing bleeding through thin paper.

The only things that the mind cannot examine are memories of the future. Ahead of her now is an amorphous light, flickering like some gas of unknown composition.